1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to a method, system, and computer program product for production, revision, and hierarchical organization of electronic documents for local or global electronic network publication in the form of web browser- or word processor-accessible documents containing automatically updated lists with summary information of and hyperlinks to an underlying set of electronic documents with detailed information for each item in a given list.
2. Discussion of the Background
Software tools are now available to simplify the design and publication of static home pages in markup languages such as, for example, Hyper Text Markup Language (“HTML”) or eXtensible Markup Language (“XML”) formatted text files in combination with graphics files for World Wide Web (web) publishing. Exemplary software tools include Microsoft FrontPage, NetObjects Fusion, and HotMetal Pro. The main advantage of static home pages is the ease of design of static home pages utilizing text files with embedded “tags,” and the structural power inherent in linking documents using hyperlinks. The main disadvantage of static home page designs arises when the contents of the static pages requires frequent updates, particularly when such frequent updates involve adding and deleting a significant number of pages, as well as adding and deleting hyperlinks that refer to those updated pages from other parts of a given web page structure. For example, adding a new product description page or removing an existing page from a product catalog on the web normally involves revisions of additional pages. Those additional pages may include summary lists, or tables, of various products and product groups, which in turn may have hyperlinks to more detailed descriptions on the product description pages.
Microsoft FrontPage checks hyperlinks and creates reports of malfunctioning links between a summary list file and a detailed description file for each item in the summary list file. However, in response to adding or deleting the detailed description and graphical files, it does not automatically create, modify, or remove item summaries and their respective hyperlinks in the list.
As the burden of updating and organizing frequently revised static pages increases, some web site designers have chosen to use a database system with functions that generate interfaces between a database and web browsers in an HTML framework. For example, it is possible that a page may contain only page design tags and script commands, while the page's information contents may be retrieved dynamically from an Internet-connected server database's records and fields. U.S. Pat. No. 5,835,712 to DuFresne discloses such a technique. Active Server Pages running on the Microsoft Personal Web browser are another technique. FIGS. 1A and 1B illustrate a web document where data are retrieved from a database. In the web page design shown in FIG. 1A, a web page 100 includes a begin tag 102 and an end tag 108 and one line of code 106 for the web page publisher. The line of code 106 includes the database name and a Structured Query Language (“SQL”) query. FIG. 1B shows a web page 110 including data returned from the database as it would appear to an end user. For setup and frequent maintenance of simple HTML-formatted pages as shown in FIG. 1A, many users have opted to use a client/server database web page solution (even for quite small data volumes and a relatively moderately sized updating frequency).
The dynamic retrieval occurs “on demand” and as defined from the page script commands. Thus, if information is changed in the database, this revision will automatically appear on the database-linked web page the next time a browser requests this page. Hereafter, this solution is referred to as a database-centric web page solution, and web pages which utilize this solution are referred to as database-centric web pages.
Dynamic web page publishing, including database-centric web pages and form-initiated database queries (i.e., search engine systems), rather than presenting this information in the form of pre-formatted or “static” web pages, requires that the information is retrieved on-the-fly from a database on the Internet or Intranet server on request. Queries to the database are processed by script programs which execute a search engine's algorithms to retrieve all the relevant data records from the database that satisfy a specific query from a user. The search engine then returns an HTML-formatted screen image of a list of “hits” to the user who has submitted the query. The user may then select one specific item on the list, and thereby engage the search engine once more to retrieve the full record information for this specific item and display it, for example, on a computer screen. Thus, each query generates a new search result from scratch. The database and the search engine reside, for example, either on a company's server or Intranet server, or on an Internet Service provider's Internet server.
A database-centric web page solution offers a large degree of functional flexibility and power to handle dynamic publication of large amounts of data on the web. In addition, a database-centric web page solution has the advantage of maintaining a given web page design, or profile. This is due to the fact that the profile is given a priori by the template of HTML or XML tags, combined with script function calls to retrieve data from the database. The main disadvantage is that a database system utilizing this solution is more resource-demanding than a database system in which the data is organized as simple static web documents such as, for example, text, sound, video, image and graphics files.
In spite of recent attempts to simplify setup and maintenance of database-centric dynamic web page publications based on templates for page layout and design, the switch from static pages is still an obstacle for most companies and institutions or for local offices and departments within such organizations. This switch is particularly unsuitable for smaller and medium sized companies, with limited information technology (“IT”) knowledge and capacity to support a locally-administered database-driven web page system such as database-centric web pages. Consequently, without database-centric web page management tools, many existing static home pages have outdated contents due to a limited time available to perform necessary revisions on the static web pages. Many potential publication projects that could be maintained, for example, from a given office or local department using a database-centric web page solution are postponed due to lack of resources to switch to a database-centric solution and lack of the time resources necessary to individually update all the static web page sites and their hyperlinks.
One advantage of the present invention is that it simplifies the setup and maintenance of web publication for web pages which need frequent updating, and where the publication fits into a template of a hierarchy of overview category list document files with summary data from underlying detailed description electronic document files. This task has been time-consuming and impractical using conventional HTML editor tools. Thus, users have had to convert to database-centric frameworks.